In the essay “On Vicarious Causation,” the young and talented American philosopher Graham Harman writes:
We [humans] are not more critical than animals, but more object-oriented, filling our minds with all present and absent objects, all geographical and astronomical places, all species of animal, all flavors of juice, all players from the history of baseball, all living and dead languages.
With this important insight in mind, let’s turn to today’s lead story in Science News:
This portrait, the deepest infrared image of the universe ever taken, shows a candidate galaxy (inset) that may be the most distant object known in the universe. It is estimated to lie about 13.2 billion light-years from Earth and could have existed just 480 million years after the Big Bang.
How far can our love of objects go? Very far indeed.
But just to be clear, this is only the limit of our visible horizon, correct? I mean there might be many more, we just cannot see them due to the limitations of our instruments.
Well, yes and no, Vince. Our instruments are limited, yes, but the universe isn’t a heck of a lot older than 13 billion years, so the chances of our seeing anything farther away are pretty small.
Oh, for christ’s sake. Write this shit in your journal, Charles.
13 billion years in the motherfucking past, bitches!
Interesting Harman essay, thanks.
But unless I’m missing something, he’s covertly propounding a version of the view his whole theory purports to reject: the privileged status of the human observer. He argues directly from an epistemological limitation to an ontological conclusion.
Unless I’m badly misreading this essay, his argument that phenomena do no make contact – their darkness, or remoteness, or what have you – is based on their unknowability in a final sense. That makes no sense. The idealist contention, which I strongly support over this perspective, is that distinctions concerning the difference or sameness of objects is a judgment of the intellect. Things in themselves are neither autonomous nor in relationship, neither remote or in contact. Those are phenomenological descriptions that can only pertain to perceived objects.
To say that they are unknowable is to say they are uncharacterizable, not that they are ontologically remote from one another.
Actually, Gendun, Harman’s argument is a little bit stranger than you’ve stated it. Part of what Harman wants wants to do is remove “the intellect” from its position of privilege, making it just one of the ways that objects experience each other, but not any more or less important than other ways objects experience each other. A chair experiences a floor in a certain way, for instance, and this experience doesn’t exhaust the qualities of the chair or the floor. A sentient creature also experiences a floor, and part of how it does so involves its intellect, but there’s nothing fundamentally or importantly different the intellect brings to the situation that establishes the difference or sameness of the objects any more than they already are different by being different objects. All of this goes on whether or not there are any humans with their intellects making it happen; objects are even real whether or not any other objects experience them.
His argument is that objects themselves do not make contact, not that phenomena don’t. Objects are ultimately always withdrawn from their qualities, and an object only experiences another objects qualities — the real object is always withdrawn behind the qualities. That’s what the vicarious causation is for — causation doesn’t work from object to object since every object is withdrawn from other objects, instead causation works when two (or more) objects enter into a relation that forms a new object composed of the other objects, and causation is part of what happens to objects when they make up part of other objects.
But, no, he doesn’t covertly propound the privileged status of the human observer.